Kids love them, they make a party a party, but have you ever wondered where they come from? After a bit of digging, it turns out that balloons have a long, interesting history:

Balloons started out as entrails or bowels filled with air, and the Aztecs were actually the first people in history to make animals out of them.

The first rubber balloons were made by Professor Michael Faraday in 1824 for use in his experiments with hydrogen at the Royal Institution in London. `The caoutchouc is exceedingly elastic’, he wrote in the Quarterly Journal of Science the same year. `Bags made of it…have been expanded by having air forced into them, until the caoutchouc was quite transparent, and when expanded by hydrogen they were so light as to form balloons with considerable ascending power….’ Faraday made his balloons by cutting round two sheets of rubber laid together and pressing the edges together. The tacky rubber welded automatically, and the inside of the balloon was rubbed with flour to prevent the opposing surfaces joining together.

Toy balloons were introduced by pioneer rubber manufacturer Thomas Hancock the following year in the form of a do-it-yourself kit consisting of a bottle of rubber solution and a condensing syringe.

You can find much more on the history of balloons by checking out balloonhq.com. Who would have thought that something so seemingly simple had such a fascinating history. Here’s to many more years of balloons… the rubber ones that is.